Blogroll

A glance at what Spokesman-Review bloggers have to say

June 12 – I’ve had the pleasure of seeing snakes on at least a dozen of my area hikes in the last month. Most of them were large but harmless bull snakes – but three were rattlers, which also are mostly harmless unless you try to play with them.

I came across the rattlesnakes along the Snake River and at Steamboat Rock State Park. One rattler at Escure Ranch had been killed. I prefer not to kill rattlesnakes. While poisonous if provoked, they do far more good than harm.

EndNotes

By Rebecca Nappi

June 8 – I interviewed a telecommunications expert from South Carolina, Gene Retske, who said within five years phone calls won’t be nearly as popular as they have been through history. People will do a lot more texting and email to conduct business and keep in touch.

Then he said: “I was watching an old ‘Twilight Zone’ today. If Rod Serling were around today, he’d have (episodes) featuring emails from your dead parents.”

For all other ‘Twilight Zone’ fans out there, think back to how many of his episodes featured people communicating from the great beyond. It’s a shame Serling died at 50, of a heart attack.

The Slice

By Paul Turner

June 7 – So it’s not new, and it’s definitely not just a Spokane thing.

But the pervasiveness, in certain circles, of ending every third utterance with a catch-all “… and (common scatological swear word)” sort of cracks me up.

If you have been out of the home, you have heard it. “So we were going over to that one place to mess around and (that word).”

It might strike some as intellectually lazy. But this popular sentence-ending construction does save the speaker the task of specifically delineating all of the likely variables to be encountered. And it holds open all sorts of possibilities, even if the anticipated behavioral context is a familiar framework of not especially ennobling activities. But where it’s really funny is when it is unexpectedly tacked on to sentences that start out sounding a tad more formal.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m completing the paperwork that I’ll need to submit to run for mayor and ( ).”